Salon: Blumenthal: Revolt of the Goldwater Conservatives

[kskiska]

In Arizona, home of American conservatism's feisty icon, independent-minded voters may have a nasty surprise for George W. Bush.

Barry Goldwater was the alpha of the conservative movement, his capture of the Republican Party nomination in 1964 prophetic. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." Even in defeat came the promise of ultimate triumph when Ronald Reagan appeared in a last-minute television appeal, the moment launching his political career. George W. Bush presents himself as Reagan's true heir down to his cowboy boots, not the scion to his wing-tipped Eastern patrician father.

It was Goldwater, the genuine article, who established the image of conservative as Western hero. His persona was indistinguishable from his ideology. He was the imperial individual, the free spirit embodying the free market. He seemed a natural force in Arizona, a state on the economic frontier. With less than a million inhabitants before World War II, it exploded afterward. In his time, Goldwater appeared as new and startling as the booming suburbs in the desert.

(snip)

"Barry was always a social liberal," Susan Goldwater Levine, his widow, keeper of the flame, told me at her home, high in the hills above Phoenix, watching a pastel sunset, in 70 degree winter weather. "Barry believed that people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted in their own homes." When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women's right to abortion and for gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. "He hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party," she said. "Barry hated the right wing."

(snip)

Arizona has been a real estate developer's paradise -- a low-tax haven, where social services are starved and the state Legislature is ruled with an iron fist by the Republican religious right. It might seem counterintuitive that it could go Democratic. But the Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, told me, "Yes, we can win Arizona." She takes her own election as a token of things that might come. Napolitano is a former Clinton appointee as U.S. attorney and was elected Arizona's attorney general; she is young, energetic and politically adroit. The contradictions of conservatism that have led to her becoming governor are now widening.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/02/26/goldwater/index.html

[lcordero]

1. It seems the Republicans were much different then

and so were the Democrats.

http://bernie.house.gov/biography/cqbio.asp

"Here is the Democratic Party, a party which prided itself for 60 years on defending the interests of working people and the poor, making a radical shift to the right, and accepting policy which Richard Nixon would have summarily rejected," writes Sanders in his biography, Outsider in the House.

[kaitykaity]

2. These people will be our natural allies eventually.

This pleases me to no end. :evilgrin:

[WingNOT]

3. Kick - great writing by SB

Read this in yesterday's Guardian at the gym - couldn't help laughing out loud at various passages :-)

Shorter reading than the Clinton Wars too !